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judgecorp writes "Nokia has admitted that it routinely decrypts user's HTTPS traffic, but says it is only doing it so it can compress it to improve speed. That doesn't convince security researcher Gaurang Pandya, who accuses the company of spying on customers."
From the article, Nokia says: "'Importantly, the proxy servers do not store the content of web pages visited by our users or any information they enter into them. When temporary decryption of HTTPS connections is required on our proxy servers, to transform and deliver users' content, it is done in a secure manner. ... Nokia has implemented appropriate organisational and technical measures to prevent access to private information. Claims that we would access complete unencrypted information are inaccurate.'"

They don't just tell you - they advertise it. It's one of the phones biggest selling features.

The issue in countries where the phone is sold is network traffic. It's costly. VERY costly. This browser does what opera mini did for about a decade - it works through nokia's special proxy that fetches the page for you, renders it in unique way that saves a lot of traffic and then sends it to your phone's browser.

Amazon Silk browser does the same, Opera mini does the same, what's with this jumping on the Nokia hate bandwagon? Perhaps they should stop proxying HTTPS traffic, but remember in third world countries data comes at a HUGE premium, so these services are a god send, especially with a lot of sites moving to HTTPS by default. I would hope that Opera/Amazon/Nokia are atleast as credible as your ISP though it's an additional point of failure.

Your ISP cannot decrypt SSL traffic.Not everyone lives in a third world nation and surely they should be able to opt out of this.

You can "opt out" by using a real browser instead of one that's designed to be proxy-assisted. Why is everyone getting so worked up about this? If you're not living in a third world nation, why would you be using this browser anyway?

I know this is slashdot and we do not read much what people so that we can rant and seem smart. But come on, it is written in TFS and TFT (the F-ing title). "Nokia admits decrypting user data." From their own admission, they are performing a MITM attack, that is to say, they are putting themself in the middle of an encrypted connexion making each party believe they are directly and securely talking to each other.

Whether they clearly explained it to the user, I do not know, but I am sure they are performing

Are you saying the device does not have a tcp/ip stack? Because if it does, there is no reason the data MUST be decrypted. The device could (and I would expect it to) talk directly with the remote server.

TFA mentions the user of the phone was able to track the DNS request, so clearly the device can talk TCP/IP.

The piece of software is called "Nokia Xpress Browser". It is not called "Nokia VNC client". I do understand the technology. I implemented (a much simpler version of) such a system in PHP 10 years ago

As I said before, what Opera Mini is doing is the same thing. Though, I am not sure Opera Mini is doing it for https (maybe it does I just don't know). But Opera Mini tells you all the traffic is routed through them. Nokia Xpress Browser does not appear to tell the user (since some users are surprised of the behavior)

As I said before, what Opera Mini is doing is the same thing. Though, I am not sure Opera Mini is doing it for https (maybe it does I just don't know). But Opera Mini tells you all the traffic is routed through them. Nokia Xpress Browser does not appear to tell the user (since some users are surprised of the behavior)

He's a software developer, mostly focusing on database integration. He has no professional security experience beyond what you'd get in that role. source [linkedin.com]

what's with this jumping on the Nokia hate bandwagon?

You can't opt out of it; The platform is locked. Also, it's a cell phone, so there's a strong link between all internet traffic and a realworld identity. This isn't like Opera or Amazon, for which there are anonymizing options available to the enterprising individuals who wish to use said services (or don

Wrong profile linked. Correct [linkedin.com] profile. Stupid misclick. Ugh. In other news, his background is not a software developer, but a network admin with some cisco experience. Like many in that area of IT, there is some exposure to security. I wouldn't call him an expert in MIM attacks, but he's not a layperson either.

You sit there in the lap of luxury completely ignorant of your own past, and don't even realize that you are complaining about others being able to browse the web at all because they still do not sit in the lam of luxury like you do.

Listen kiddo, I was on the internet before it was the internet, and I had a computer before the original Nintendo you grew up with was even a gleam in an electrical engineer's eye, so don't tell me I'm ignorant of my own past. I've forgotten more about IT than you're likely to ever know. Don't make me get my old IBM XT keyboard out of storage and beat you with it.

That said, it's in storage for a reason. The world moved on. So did cell phones, which were originally the size of bricks and had an LED readout a

Who cares what his credentials are? He's making a claim that a lot of people can verify. Is his claim false?

I would hope that Opera/Amazon/Nokia are atleast as credible as your ISP though it's an additional point of failure.

They are, which is not at all. My ISP doesn't have certificates installed in my browser, and aren't secretly decrypting my SSL traffic (unless SSL is fundamentally broken in a way which isn't publicly known yet).

For the most part my 'ISP' can't break into my SSL connections. They don't have a certificate authority my machine will trust, so any kind of MTIM they might do without a herculean effort on their part anyway is going to be impossible. These phone users had essentially no idea.

So the moral of the story is DO NOT DO NOT trust that SSL is secure on any device you don't directly control the CA certificates present, and probably you can't trust and SSL code you can't audit to make sure it trusts only the CAs

According to Amazon's statement to the EFF Silk does _not_ intercept HTTPS traffic:

SSL Traffic

Amazon does not intercept encrypted traffic, so your communications over HTTPS would not be accelerated or tracked. According to Jon Jenkins, director of Silk development, “secure web page requests (SSL) are routed directly from the Kindle Fire to the origin server and do not pass through Amazon’s EC2 servers.” In other words, no HTTPS requests will ever use cloud acceleration mode. Given the prevalence of web pages served over HTTPS, this gives Amazon good incentive to make Silk fast and usable even when cloud acceleration is off. Turning it off completely should be a viable option for users.

It doesn't matter what his credentials are, if he's right, which he appears to be based on Nokia's response.

Of course he is "right", in that he through incompetence has "discovered" that there is a class of mobile browser "front-ends" (not really full web browsers) that do server based rendering and compression to save bandwith and increase speed on slow connection. Which has been well known (at least for people interested in mobile browsers) for years, fx all Opera Mini browsers do this, on all platforms, with millions of users.

They are not really full web browsers but fancy terminals, you use a server to brow

The reason Nokia is able to do this is that they control the browser. According to the article browsers on Nokia phones are delivered with a certificate, that allows Nokia to perform this MITM attack. They call it a feature and provide a plausible explanation of what benefit it has for the users. However enabling such a risky feature without user consent is a really bad move and means users should no longer trust Nokia products as much as they have done in the past.

The issue is that the phone is not good enough to run a real browser. So instead the mini browser get simplified instructions from the servers where the actual HTML parser is.
So basically you are running a remote browser on Nokia's or Opera's servers.

If that's what Nokia is doing, then the article is totally inaccurate. In the article there is no suggestion the phone isn't capable of running a full browser. The proxies are just used to compress the data better before being sent to the client.

The issue is that the phone is not good enough to run a real browser. So instead the mini browser get simplified instructions from the servers where the actual HTML parser is.So basically you are running a remote browser on Nokia's or Opera's servers.

If that's what Nokia is doing, then the article is totally inaccurate. In the article there is no suggestion the phone isn't capable of running a full browser. The proxies are just used to compress the data better before being sent to the client.

it is what nokia is doing and they blatantly copied the idea from Opera, they call it a proxy browser.

these phones are extension of the s40 platform. nokias cheapest range, albeit even in that range I guess you could technically run a real browser(reportedly 128mbytes of ram for 3xx range, 32mbytes for the asha 2xx range, fyi nokias real browser sucks a** with 256 so good luck running it on 32mbytes minus OS). these articles are stupid because you could have written this based on data they released back the

Isn't that the whole point of HTTPS, to ensure that a man-in-the-middle attack (in this case, a probably benign proxy) is impossible?Also, why? Doesn't every website now compress html/css/js with mod_gzip?

Isn't that the whole point of HTTPS, to ensure that a man-in-the-middle attack (in this case, a probably benign proxy) is impossible?

It is only impossible without the collusion of a trusted certificate authority. When was the last time you reviewed the list on your browser? Oh, and did YOU do anything to determine if any of those organizations were trustworthy.

If you get a mobile device from your mobile provider, there is a pretty good chance that they stuck their own root CA in there somewhere. Maybe they just use it for SSL connections to their own websites/email/etc. But, trusted is trusted in the world of SSL which means they could just MITM every connection you make.

Ditto for any PC you use at work. Chances are your employer has a trusted CA somewhere in there, which means they can MITM any SSL connection you make to any service on the web.

If they didn't actually modify your browser you can probably spot this by pulling up the certificate info for your connection and noting who issued it.

This is why I believe SSL offers a false sense of security. Moving to certificates distributed over DNSSEC would cut out the middlemen, and it would improve security. Only the domain registrar for google.com could tamper with their certificates, for example. That still isn't perfect, but it is better than any CA anywhere on the globe.

I actually know for a fact that my employer DOES do this, and very explicitly distrust their certificate to insure that any https connection results in a warning. Any https connection going out of the company must trust their certificate to complete. If I claim that their proxy was used to steal my bank details, they'd ask me why I was using company property for personal business. They would probably be doing so while in the process of terminating my employment for violating the "Misuse of company resources

How is that different from an ordinary server cert? I just got a cert for my own domain; that doesn't let me masquerade as a bank. If I get my browser from Mozilla, how do I know that my ISP isn't snooping? If I'm reading you correctly, you're saying that the entire HTTPS spec is a total wreck, and we'd be better off without it than a false illusion of security?

If I get my browser from Mozilla, how do I know that my ISP isn't snooping?

You trust two things:

1. That Mozilla didn't put the root certificate for an untrustworthy firm into their browser. (Ha! Have you seen the list of root certificates with most browsers these days? Seems everyone and his dog can send their CA certificate in to the browser vendors).2. That the trustworthy root certificates that are in there will not subsequently be used for nefarious purposes - eg. to sign a wildcard certificate and then hand that over to your ISP.

How is that different from an ordinary server cert? I just got a cert for my own domain; that doesn't let me masquerade as a bank. If I get my browser from Mozilla, how do I know that my ISP isn't snooping? If I'm reading you correctly, you're saying that the entire HTTPS spec is a total wreck, and we'd be better off without it than a false illusion of security?

You aren't a CA. The person who issued you the cert is. THEY CAN masquerade as a bank if they want to.

The issue is more with things like mobile devices - chances are you didn't buy your phone from Mozilla. When the day comes that Ubuntu is selling phones I'd say chances are they'll stick their own CA on them, and thus they could MITM any connection (which isn't to say that they would).

I'm not saying that we're better off without SSL at all - that is as ridiculous as the warnings you get when you connect

Why wouldn't this be exactly the same problem, just a different set of people where you have to trust all of them?

The scope of their authority is at least limited. If I connect to mail.google.com, only those who control the root servers can issue a certificate for.com, only those who control.com can issue a certificate for google.com, and only google.com can issue a certificate for mail.google.com.

Sure, I'd rather not have to trust Verisign to not falsify a google.com certificate, but at least we're down to only one company for any particular domain. The maintainer of.com could not issue.de certificates, and vice

True, the point is that if you modify the source of Firefox or Chrome to not show a SSL error when the certificate is yours, then you have the situation of the Nokia browser, but that doesn't means SSL is broken because of that

Dear god. Is this what corporations do instead of serious engineering work to debloat the network stacks, drivers and hardware or start implementing things like TCP Fast Open?:-|
Another example where fixing bufferbloat needs a strong front because people will start doing the wrong things when trying to fix something.
Just as BitTorrent-induced latency was made the culprit of slow networks and caused people to think it's good to go away from Net Neutrality and charge premium for a premium experience. Nons

Not relevant to this story. That quote is about people surrendering rights because they think the net effect will be safety. This is like your postman steaming open your envelopes and claiming he's only looking for anthrax. Nokia users aren't volunteering their secure channels to get some level of protection.

If you don't trust Nokia to not snoop on your data then why are you carrying around a device made by Nokia that contains a camera and a microphone and a cellular connection to the internet (and probably a gps though I don't know the details of Nokia's phones)?

The user makes what he believes to be an encrypted connection. Nokia interposes their server into this connection without the user's knowledge and decrypts their data (both ways), and then claims this is perfectly OK, since they're doing it to optimize bandwidth or such. whether they make use of the information or not, they are intercepting and decrypting a connection the user believes to be private.

This seems awfully like wiretapping and unauthorized interception of data communications. If it isn't illegal to decrypt an encrypted transaction if you are not the intended recipient, perhaps it should be. I'd wager it *is* illegal under EU data protection laws, but IANAL. It's probably OK in the US, due to some obscure law permitting just this activity, passed at the request of some large corporation.

Amazon Silk's terms and conditions state that Amazon will keep your the Web addresses you visit, the IP addresses you use, and your Kindle Fire's unique media access control (MAC) addresses for 30 days. With that information, Amazon can track your every Web move.

There must be serious flaws in HTTPS if they can decrypt the traffic for hosts that they don't control the certs for.

They control the browser. According to the article, the necessary certificate is installed on phones as Nokia ships them.

This is exactly what i was thinking/fearing. This is some scary shit, basically you ought to treat HTTPS on your Nokia device like HTTP, unless you really really trust that Nokia knows what they are doing and how to keep a secret. The striking thing is that users obviously have no idea they are handshaking with Nokia instead of their bank, doctor, etc. Are there at least alternate browsers available?

The point is... you can find a browser that doesn't fuck you over and use that. Yes, they can be bad, but for things like, say, open source browsers, you can read the code and see what it is doing. Or you can find some security researcher who will find all of those vulnerabilities and tell you about them.

You have zero control and little transparency even, when Nokia decides that it would be just great to decrypt your traffic. I understand that faster traffic is good, but a third party decrypting for any

The point is... you can find a browser that doesn't fuck you over and use that.

And you can find a phone that doesn't take advantage of you and use that. The trouble is, this sort of "doesn't take advantage of you" isn't exactly a selling point among the mass market, which means a product like this won't be produced for a mass-market price.

for things like, say, open source browsers, you can read the code and see what it is doing.

At a certain point, if you are going to have control over the browser to that extent, you need to be responsible for either maintaining the security standards so that HTTPS works as advertised, or you need to make it abundantly clear that you, as the provider, can now read their encrypted traffic.

And, let's be clear here, if someone compiled a binary that did not match the source code, I do have the option of compiling myself, but it is more likely that someone who is more likely to do it, like a security r

> If it's open source YOU have the power to stop it from doing anything like that

In principle and theory, yes. In practice, maybe not. You would almost certainly use libraries installed on the device, unless you plan to roll your own from scratch (and that's going to eat a lot of SRAM). They could still sniff and snoop at the library level.

Or, they could simply sniff and snoop whatever is displayed on the screen. Your open-source browser is "clean," but Nokia is, in essence, a snoop looking over your shoulder. Character-recognition software is small and fast nowadays.

Waiting for a Slashdot story about how THAT is happening, by the way. Some manufacturers and providers are already admitting that they can access the mike and the camera on your smartphone to "see" and "hear" what you're up to...

Ergo, I have no doubt whatsoever that even using an open-source browser won't protect you. The only real answer is to ensure that you never do anything really sensitive on a smartphone. I certainly don't.

But I think you're on the right path. Nobody is going to be able to build a phone from scratch without relying on other people's work, from the API libraries to the silicon, and have it be even remotely functional.

Modern technology is basically billions of man hours distilled into a single object, repeated multiple times into a useful device. How many of those hours have roots in being malicious, or a snoop, or a government planting seeds?

From what I understand, the browser is not doing HTTPS at all to the bank/docter etc, its doing HTTP or HTTPS to the nokia proxy and proxy is doing the HTTPS to bank/doctor. In this scenario HTTPS is not broken, the phone is. Total fail Nokia

it's doing a special protocol to nokias servers(encrypted).just like opera mini has been doing for years.

they did this as a feature catchup. also it enables them to actually RENDER THE FUCKING PAGES THE PHONE WOULDN'T OTHERWISE BE ABLE TO. that's how these light browsers manage to do their magic on really shitty hw.

sometimes slashdot feels like full of fucking idiots who have been living under 324 feet of rock without internet.

if you don't like it, buy a phone that costs more than ninety bucks(no subs).

Your trust is extended because of the expectations involved. The user/owner of the device is not informed that, unlike his PC or other smart phone devices, Nokia is handling encyption differently. As https is used primarily for the purpose of securing data traffic between the user and their banks or their other services which need security, the expectation has always been that it would not involve the maker of the device which is being used.

I "trust" my car maker to build a good car. I do not "trust" them not to install cameras in it without my knowledge and then tell me later "there are cameras, but we are not looking at the video feed."

I don't trust Microsoft in the slightest, but I can use their stuff on my PC because I have the ability to audit and control what comes in and out of my computer. If they try something, either I can discover it myself, or one of a hundred security researchers will be able to find it. Also, the application software encrypting my data is installed by me and under my control and ability to inspect.

The idea with HTTPS is that you know that you *cannot* trust the intervening internet/cellular carrier infrastru

On their own phones, they just install a browser and their own trusted wildcard cert.

Then anything you browse to, the browser trusts and encrypts but just to the "wrong" destination.

On any decent machine, or decent browser under your own control, you wouldn't let it happen. And if you did, SSL would be similarly "broken".

SSL is a trust mechanism only. If your phone trusts Nokia, the padlock icon means nothing beyond that you're talking to Nokia. If your phone DIDN'T trust Nokia, it wouldn't be an issue and they would have to pass your traffic through unchanged (and still encrypted!) to the destination servers or risk SSL warnings on your browser.

This is why you don't ignore browser certificate warnings, and why you NEVER install a certificate on your computer (or allow software to). I've seen software that installs a trust certificate for the vendor when installed (as administrator), that would be show up and be allowed in the IE certificate store too (so browsing to any site with a cert signed by that cert would let you think you were talking to Google, etc.)

See also Google's TURKTRUST issue lately - if you trusted TURKTRUST, you thought you were talking to Google and weren't. If you didn't, you would just have got an error and still been secure.

The same thing can be (and is) accomplished in normal desktop OSs by adding a CA certificate to the certificate store. It's commonly used in businesses that have an HTTPS proxy as well as an HTTP proxy so they can filter/monitor HTTPS access as well. IIRC there was an Ask Slashdot question about it as well. In any case, no modification of the implementation is needed.

How is easy, as other have said. How legally? That is another matter. As I read it, they are committing a DMCA violation by breaking a security measure. Should be able to go after them for anticircumvention tools, and force them to remove the cirt.

Yes, this IS wiretapping. I don't care if they've got a tiny tiny line item in their terms of service that say they're doing this, NO ONE expects their https encrypted session with their bank to be in the clear on Nokia's servers.

I'd really really like to see the RCMP charge Nokia Canada's CIO just on principle. Just because big companies have lawyers and huge t.o.s. don't mean they should be treated any differently than joe blow secretly inserting software on his aunt's computer to listen in to her voip conversations.

HTTPS is only as secure as the implementation. The implementation in their browser deliberately implements it poorly, and accepts Nokia's server saying "yes, I verified the certificate on the remote server" as being valid verification of the cert.

Not really, it's relatively trivial to establish a man in the middle attack if you completely control the communication channel. A requests a secure channel to B from C. Instead C establishes a secure channel with A *claiming* that it's B, while also establishing a secure channel to B claiming that it's A. Theoretically any node your connection passes through could do this, but given the fluidity of internet routing algorithms only the ISPs at either end are likely to be able to actually pull it off. Or

A requests a secure channel to B from C. Instead C establishes a secure channel with A *claiming* that it's B, while also establishing a secure channel to B claiming that it's A.

You're describing a MITM attack [wikipedia.org], which is prevented by SSL and TLS by using certificates -- C can only fool A into thinking it's B if C knows B's private key (in which case, C has essentially stolen B's identity).

What happens in Nokia phone's case is that the browser happily trusts C to forward things to B without looking at what's being transmitted (the browser accepts C's certificate authority).

As for 'discrediting the other party', anyone who thinks that a third party cracking my SSL session to my bank is no big deal has already discredited themselves. The fact that we have a dozen or people people in this thread saying it's OK is a clear sign of how far Slashdot has sunk.